


Holding Promise

by Cleo the Muse (cleothemuse)



Series: Grampa Steve's Bedtime Stories [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, But Kind of Is Anyway, F/M, Gen, Not A Fix-It, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Time Travel, it's complicated - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-24
Updated: 2019-05-24
Packaged: 2020-03-13 12:46:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18941242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cleothemuse/pseuds/Cleo%20the%20Muse
Summary: When they moved from the lake house to Manhattan, Morgan's Mommy made five very specific promises, but so far, she hasn't met Morgan's expectations.Captain Steve gets in a little practice before his big mission, and has a much-needed chat with his oldest friend.





	Holding Promise

**Author's Note:**

> This story uses my personal custom work skin for some simple formatting shortcuts, and should not interfere with any accessibility accommodations you may have enabled. However, if you find the formatting in some areas seems a bit off to you or if it _is_ interfering with your accessibility, please drop me a line @cleothemuse on Twitter.

The door slammed behind her as Morgan flung herself face-down on her bed, ignoring Mommy’s raised voice. Being Middle-Named was valid only when _she_ was in trouble, but this time _she_ wasn’t the one who did something wrong. This time, it was _Mommy_ who hadn’t done what she’d promised.

With the world being full of people again, Mommy was needed back at her work, and even though Morgan had suggested Mommy could just fly to work every day in her suit, Mommy decided it would be better if they packed up the lake house and moved to the city. Along with that move, there were promises that were made because of what they were leaving behind: except when they returned for vacations, Morgan wasn’t going to have her playhouse or the lake or all the trees that surrounded the house. As a trade-off, she was going to get an apartment in the sky, new adventures in parks and playgrounds all over the city, music and art and dance lessons, a play group with other kids her own age, and maybe—if she was good and responsible—her very own puppy or kitten. 

So far, those promises had fallen very, _very_ short.

One: the apartment in the sky didn’t float in the air; instead, it was just perched on top of a regular building. The one time she’d gone outside at night to look at the stars like she and Daddy used to do, she found that the night sky was far too bright with lights from the city, with maybe only a half-dozen stars and a planet visible. Fortunately, Miss Friday had moved into the new apartment with them, and she was able to project the night sky as it should have been onto the ceiling of Morgan’s new bedroom.

Two… okay, promise number two had mostly been kept, but promise number three was only barely addressed. She’d started lessons at a private academy that said it was for gifted students, but all they taught was math and science she already knew, language she mostly knew, and history she sort of knew. Music and art were part of the lessons, but she could sing songs and play with fingerpaints all on her own: she wasn’t learning anything _new_. Promise number four had technically been kept, but sometimes the other kids in the play group thought she was weird when _they_ were the ones who had weird ideas about what was or wasn’t fun.

And promise number five? Not addressed _at all_.

“Morgan Haroldene Stark, you open this door _right now_ ,” Mommy warned from right outside.

“No!” she yelled back, jamming her head under her pillows. It’s not like the door was _locked_ , and even if it was, Miss Friday could just unlock it anyway.

Unless she broke or jammed the lock in some way? Thrusting her hands under the pillows, she carded her fingers through the hair at the top of her head and began to stroke her scalp; Daddy had always told her he was “massaging your brain cells” when he did it to her. Ever since, she’d decided that massaging her brain cells was the best way to think.

Before she’d gotten past “step one: tell Miss Friday to lock the door”, Mommy had already opened the door.

“Morgan, look at me.”

“No.”

“Sweetie, I’m not mad at you, I just want you to look at me, okay?”

“No.”

There was a loud sigh—not quite to the level of a Dealing with The Board Sigh—then Mommy said, “Friday, please notify the Tokyo office that I’ll have to postpone our teleconference until tomorrow, then let Steve know we won’t be needing him tonight after all.”

“No!” Morgan exclaimed, rolling over and sitting upright.

Mommy laid her hand on Morgan’s shoulder. “Then talk to me. What’s the matter with you today?”

She flopped backward out of Mommy’s reach, staring up at the ceiling with her arms splayed out to her sides. “Enzobroughthisnewpuppytoshowandtell.”

“What?”

“Enzo. Brought. His new. _Puppy_. To show. And tell.”

“The Wakandan ambassador’s son?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay, you’re going to have to help me out, here. What’s the problem with that?”

Morgan balled her hands into fists and thrust them straight up in the air. “They moved here after we did!”

“...And?”

“You _promised!_ ”

“Sweetheart, you’re not making sense.”

Morgan tried out her own version of the Board Sigh. “When we moved. You promised.” She dropped her left arm to the bed again, but kept the right in the air so she could count the promises off a finger at a time. “Apartment in the sky. New adventures in parks and playgrounds all over. Music, art, and dance lessons. Play group with other kids my age. My own puppy or kitten.”

Mommy was quiet for a moment. “Oh, sweetie, a puppy or kitten is _a lot_ of responsibility.”

“I’m responsible! I keep my room clean and I get baths and stuff when I’m told to!”

“I’m talking about a different kind of ‘responsible’, and you—” Mommy wrapped her hands around Morgan’s ankles and pulled until her knees could fold over the edge “—are just like—” her fingers went under Morgan’s ribcage, tickling for a moment as she was repositioned upright “—your _father_.”

Morgan let her head fall forward so that her messy hair covered her eyes, then tried peering up through the curtain they made. “I’m just like Daddy?”

“In so many ways. And one of those ways is that you tend to forget to do things when you get inside your own head.”

“I don’t _forget_ ,” Morgan began, knowing she was whining but unable to correct her tone in time to stop it.

“You have to be reminded to chew _at least_ three times during breakfast every morning.”

“Not if it’s yogurt.”

“You have all of your books sorted in alphabetical order, but you can’t find your hairbrush, like, eighty-five-percent of the time.”

“Miss Friday helps me find things!”

“You nearly killed Jabber.”

Morgan’s brow wrinkled as she looked around her room and noticed that the far window sill was empty. “Where _is_ Jabber?”

“I took him up to the greenhouse two weeks ago. Even a _cactus_ needs water, sweetheart.”

“Miss Friday was supposed to remind me!”

“I told her not to,” Mommy answered, fingers sorting through Morgan’s hair until it was significantly less messy than it had been. “Friday’s an _assistant_ for your brain, not a _substitute_ for your brain. I wanted to make sure you were able to take care of another living creature all on your own before we went to something that needed as much care and attention as a puppy or kitten. You’re not there yet, sweetie.”

Morgan’s shoulders drooped. “Oh.”

“Hello! Anybody home?”

Failure forgotten, she bounced to her feet. “Grampa Steve!”

Mommy let out a short laugh. “Friday?”

“He was only a few blocks away, so I didn’t think it fair to stop him, ma’am,” the AI answered. “Furthermore, I’ve watched you negotiate with Starks for over eight years: I had confidence you’d come to an amicable resolution in due course.”

Grampa Steve appeared in the doorway. “I thought I heard a Little Bug!”

As Morgan tackled him around the legs, Mommy said, “Give me a moment to talk to Steve in private, okay?”

Reluctantly, Morgan returned to her bed, sprawling out like a starfish again while Mommy and Grampa Steve talked quietly together out in the hallway. Despite holding her breath and listening real hard she couldn’t hear what they were saying, so she amused herself by humming a made-up tune and crossing her eyes until the ceiling got all blurry and all she could see was her nose.

Mommy stepped back in the room. “I think we owe each other apologies,” she said. “I’ll go first: I apologize for not keeping the promise I made to you about art, music, and dance lessons, and for not making it clear to you how you were to prove yourself responsible enough for a pet.”

Morgan sat up, planting the palms of her hands on her knees. “I apologize for yelling at you.”

“And…?”

She wrinkled her nose. “...And?”

“Communication, sweetie.”

“Oh! And I apologize for not using my words to tell you how I was feeling.”

Mommy sat down in the armchair next to the bed. “Now, as for those lessons, you already have music and art classes at school, correct?”

She dropped her chin to her chest. “Yes.”

“But I think we can work on getting you into dance lessons,” Mommy continued.

Morgan’s head shot up. “Really?!”

“Really. Also, Grampa Steve has said he’ll be happy to teach you a little about art, if you’d like.”

“Grampa Steve knows art?”

Mommy laughed, reaching out to the bookshelf beside the bed and drawing out _Scrappy’s Stop-n-Save_. Though fairly new, it had quickly become Morgan’s favorite, as it was a brightly-illustrated story about a clever gray kitten named Scrappy who lived in a bodega. Every time Morgan went to one of those little stores with Grampa Steve or Uncle Happy, she liked to look for a shop cat and pet it if the cashier said it was okay.

“What’s that say?” Mommy asked, pointing to the bottom of the book.

“‘Written and illustrated by Steven R. Carter’,” Morgan read aloud. The name was familiar, but she couldn’t quite place it. She knew she’d seen it before, but now that she thought about it, the name might have been given as “Carter, Steven R.” instead, which she’d thought was weird but she was more interested at the time in the really old date-of-birth given on the driver’s license belonging to—

“Grampa Steve!” she exclaimed. “Grampa Steve made this book?”

“Uh-oh, I heard my name,” Grampa Steve said, stepping into the doorway.

She flung herself off the bed and at his legs again, causing him to quickly lift his hands out of the way so she didn’t run into his cane or… Jabber?

“The other thing is,” Mommy continued, “you have to try much harder with Jabber. If you can keep the cactus properly watered, we’ll try an African violet or an anthurium and see how you do, then maybe a fish or a hermit crab after that. We’ll work our way up to a puppy or kitten. Does that sound fair?”

Morgan twisted her mouth and squinted her eyes. “I guess so.”

“That greenhouse of yours is something else,” Grampa Steve said to Mommy as he handed Jabber to Morgan, who carefully accepted the cactus and returned him to his rightful place on her window sill.

“I got used to having fresh fruits, vegetables, and herbs at the lake house,” Mommy answered, standing up and brushing the wrinkles out of her suit. “Okay, I’m heading back to the office to get a few things done before the meeting with Tokyo. Morgan, sweetheart, be good for your grampa.”

“I will!” she promised, flinging her arms around Mommy and giving her a kiss when she leaned down for it.

After Mommy left, Morgan fisted her hands on her hips. “Grampa Steve, I didn’t know you could draw stories!”

“Oh, Little Bug, I draw stories for you all the time!” He waved his hand in the air, and Miss Friday followed the motion with bright lines until the general shape of a cat’s head had been formed out of a circle and two triangles.

“But that’s not like _this!_ ” she exclaimed, pointing to where _Scrappy’s Stop-n-Save_ lay on her bed.

“Ah, but general shapes like this is how it all starts,” Grampa Steve corrected. “Want me to show you how?”

“Yes!”

They spent the rest of the evening with their heads pressed together over a tablet, Grampa Steve showing her how to start with simple geometric figures and then add and erase lines until it was all a whole new image. While Grampa Steve made broccoli mac ‘n’ cheese , Morgan tried her hand at drawing with shapes, and though the puppy she drew wasn’t anywhere _near_ as good as Grampa Steve’s, it was better than anything she’d ever tried to draw before. Grampa Steve complimented her on her work and had Friday send copies of it to himself and Mommy.

After supper was bath and brush, then off to bed. Morgan carefully placed her copy of _Scrappy’s Stop-n-Save_ back on her bookshelf before crawling beneath the covers. Grampa Steve came in the room as soon as he’d finished washing up the dishes and settled into the armchair by the bed. Despite the rough start to the evening, there was comfort to be found in the routine: a kiss for Daddy, stars on the ceiling, and Grampa Steve’s soft voice spinning another tale.

*       *       *

It was a very busy final two weeks before the mission dubbed Operation: Quantum Leap (and Steve only briefly pretended he didn’t understand that reference). Doctors Banner, Pym, and van Dyne had built a smaller quantum launch platform and refined the navigator to home in on the resonance of the team’s previous passage to ensure he ended up in the right alternate realities. Shuri and Harley Keener had put their brilliant young heads together to make additional enhancements to the nanosuit stored in the navigator, including retro-reflection capabilities, giving him the ability to potentially sneak in and out of places unseen.

Steve had also been busy those two weeks, reviewing old reports and asking questions from the people who had been in the places he needed to go. He also spent some time practicing with Mjolnir—flying with her was basically throwing the hammer while desperately trying not to let go—and handling the Stones under Strange’s supervision.

After ensuring he could safely hold each barehanded, the next step was actually _using_ the Stones. Starting with the Space Stone from his own quarters, he found that all he needed to do to imbue Mjolnir with the Stone’s power was to press the Stone to the hammer and will them to merge. Likewise, concentrating on separating them was all that was needed to reverse the process.

Next, he practiced teleporting to increasingly distant points: first across the Compound, then to Manhattan and back, then halfway around the world in Wakanda. After that, he practiced jumps to places he’d never before visited but could picture: Machu Picchu in Peru, Petra in Jordan, and Angkor Wat in Cambodia. His final “picture” jump required he wear the nanosuit with the helmet engaged, as air was in very limited supply in the Sea of Tranquility.

—

“On the _moon?_ ”

“All the way to the moon, Little Bug. And since he was also Captain America, of course Captain Steve had to salute the flag Apollo 11 left behind.”

“He’s such a dork,” Morgan giggled.

Grampa Steve chuckled. “A total square, I know.”

—

Since he hadn’t felt at all drained by those galactically short trips, his next series of jumps were to places that had only been described to him by others. When he exited the portal on Morag, he used the nanosuit’s scanner function to take a picture of where he’d landed in order to confirm with Quill and Nebula that he was in the right place: a dead planet infested with spiny-backed kangaroo-rats.

His next stop was Vormir, a dark dust bowl of a moon with several pools of still, black water. Vormir’s parent planet blocked the system’s huge red sun most of the day, leaving the sky in a state of eclipse except at dawn and dusk. Under that weak lighting, it showed absolutely no signs of life, which apparently included decompositional micro-organisms: when hiking toward the tall monument on the horizon, Steve stumbled across the dessicated remains of a disturbingly familiar red-skinned being. After he compared notes with Clint, their best guess was that the man once known as the Red Skull had finally met his demise around five years ago, after Thanos left the moon with the Soul Stone that had both trapped and sustained him. With no way off the moon, Schmidt had likely endured a slow, lingering death by starvation.

Steve hated to admit it—his Catholic upbringing had extolled the virtue of forgiveness—but he felt no sympathy for his former nemesis.

He’d also briefly tried teleporting to Asgard, nanosuit fully engaged against the vacuum of space as he assumed he’d end up in an asteroid field. Instead, he startled a group of fishermen unloading their catch of the day. It wasn’t until Valkyrie swaggered down the dock that he realized where he was—the village of New Asgard in Norway—and the newly-appointed king informed him that Asgard was its people, not a place.

—

“Valkyrie’s a girl, Grampa Steve.”

“So?”

“So, don’t you mean ‘queen’?”

“Nope.”

—

With the Space Stone experiments having proved a success, he next borrowed the Reality Stone from Wanda, who had stashed it inside the backing of her TV. Not wanting to cause any actual harm to anything or anyone, he tried only simple, localized effects with it, like making his trailer vanish and reappear or covering an empty section of ground with crocuses. When the flowers remained even after he’d returned the Stone to its hiding place, he and Strange concluded the Stone’s alterations to reality could be permanent, so he’d have to be careful if he used it any.

His next attempt was both more and less successful. While he was able to keep his mind clear enough to pick up the Power Stone—which had been stashed inside Pepper’s on-site office in an empty arc reactor casing—he had not properly accounted for just how _strong_ it made him. The serum alone had made him far stronger than a normal human: he could hold the weight of a midsize car, but not for very long. With Mjolnir in his hand, the car could be lifted with only his free hand. With the Power Stone channeled _through_ Mjolnir, he accidentally hurled the car into the Compound’s lake when he tried to pick it up.

Fortunately, Doctor Pym never went anywhere without his Hot Wheels Rally Case, so he wasn’t left without a car, and the recovering fish population gained yet another new reef among the countless other pieces of debris from the destruction of the Compound. To Steve’s relief, Strange reminded him that the Power Stone was the first he would return, so he wasn’t likely to need to use it after all.

Hope van Dyne kept the Mind Stone inside a puzzle box. Steve’s test for it was brief, successfully erasing from Scott’s memory a long-winded but otherwise harmless conversation with Steve about food trucks. Steve didn’t like the way the Mind Stone seemed to whisper into his _own_ mind when he held it, so he was grateful when it was time to put it away.

He refused to do more with the Soul Stone than to confirm he could pick it up safely from the shoe box in the back of Carol’s closet.

—

“I don’t understand how that last hiding place qualifies as ‘ridiculous’,” Morgan complained.

“What’s the bottom of a shoe called?”

Morgan rolled her eyes. “Okay, that _is_ ridiculous.”

—

Finally, he used the Time Stone to reverse a series of coin tosses Strange made and correctly “guess” the sequence of outcomes which followed as the action was repeated. With all the Stones successfully tested, he was finally ready.

The night before the mission, Bucky found him at his desk in his trailer, downloading files to the nanosuit’s upgraded memory banks, including an emergency recall sequence Shuri had emailed to him that afternoon as a backup in case he somehow couldn’t lock on to the launch portal’s homing beacon.

“What are you doing, Steve?” Bucky asked.

“Getting ready for tomorrow,” he answered, casually closing the S.H.I.E.L.D. file he’d been looking at, though he was certain Bucky’d already seen it.

“Yeah? Because it looks like you’re getting ready for a hell of a lot more than that.”

—

Morgan gasped. “Oooh, you said a bad word...”

Grampa Steve looked shocked. “Me? I didn’t say it, Uncle Bucky did!”

—

“Just making sure I have what I need,” Steve answered. “Just in case.”

Bucky slumped down on the foot of the bed, pressing his fingertips together. “You don’t have to do this alone, you know: I could come along. Any _one_ of us would gladly come along.”

Steve nodded, elbows propped up on the table as he dropped his head into his hands and rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his palms. “I know that. But I also know that this is something I _have_ to do alone. The platform isn’t very big, and we have only one navigator and nanosuit with all the new upgrades.”

Bucky rolled his shoulders. “So give the eggheads time to build another one of each! I thought the whole point of it being time travel is that the passage of time on our side doesn’t line up with the passage of time in those other realities.”

“Yeah, but it’s dangerous to keep all six Stones in the same place for long, you know that. We had a lot of people from all over come help us in that fight, and that’s a lot of people who know these things are here. A Ravager or Vanir might brag at some interstellar dive bar about what happened here, then a scout ship swings by to confirm those gamma readings, and next thing we know, we have half the galaxy going to war with each other in orbit.”

Unable to sit any longer, Steve got up and started pacing. “The longer these things are here, the more I worry.”

“Yeah, but _that_ —” Bucky gestured at Steve’s laptop “—is more than just worry for our little ol’ corner of the multiverse. You don’t owe anyone else _anything_ except the return of those Stones… and you could keep the hammer if you wanted to; I hear she likes you.”

Steve stopped next to the door and thumped his forehead softly against the wall. “No, I couldn’t.”

After a moment of silence, Bucky sighed. “No, I guess you wouldn’t be you if you did. So how long you gonna be gone?”

He turned around and leaned back against the wall, folding his arms across his chest. “Five seconds, according to Bruce.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know.” He shrugged without uncrossing his arms, shaking his head slightly as a self-deprecating smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “I dunno, as long as it takes. Tony and I… we finally found some common ground again those weeks while we all worked on the construction and planning for the ‘heist’, and we both admitted we made some mistakes along the way. I have a chance to maybe prevent some of those mistakes for those other versions of us who don’t know how much they helped us with these Stones, maybe keep them from going through what we did with Thanos.”

Bucky stood up, crossing the room to rest his prosthetic hand on Steve’s shoulder. “Yeah? And how many universes you gonna help? Why stop with just those three? Why not spend the rest of your life taking your little guilt trip to every alternate reality in the multiverse, righting the wrongs and saving the day?”

“I—” Steve began.

“When is it enough, Steve?” Bucky threw his hands in the area, spinning around before turning back to jab his pointer finger at the captain’s chest. “This is like your fight with Stark about the Accords all over again, only if _you’re_ the one holding yourself accountable, then when do you decide you’ve done _enough?_ ”

“God, I don’t know.” He slid down the wall to sit on the floor, propping his forearms up on his knees and hanging his head. “I don’t know.”

Bucky went with his motion, turning around to sit against the wall as well, shoulder-to-shoulder. “We’re _old_ , Steve. You’re even older than I am now.”

Steve barked out a laugh. “I dunno. You were in and out of the ice for seventy years; I slept the whole time.”

“Yeah, and I spent the last five years floating in the breeze while you were out here doing your Sam Wilson impression leading group therapy sessions.”

“Well, he wasn’t here: somebody had to.”

“Thought it was _him_ that did everything _you_ did, just slower.”

Steve shook his head, then tipped back against the wall again. “Maybe I’m the one who’s slower this time. Like you said: I’m _old_. A hundred and five in a few months, depending on how you count it, or thirty-eight if you count waking years only. Or maybe I’m only twenty-five still, ‘cause I sure don’t seem to have aged a day on the outside since the serum. And before the serum, I’d’ve counted myself lucky to reach even _thirty_ without busting a lung.”

—

“Captain Steve’s about as old as you are?”

Grampa Steve smiled. “Imagine that.”

—

Bucky nudged his shoulder with his own. “You did your best to get flattened by some idiot or another nearly every day, you stupid punk; always looking out for anybody but yourself. Now me? There’s things I did that maybe I didn’t have any say in doing, but I’m still the one that did them. And I know you’re gonna argue I don’t have to atone for anything HYDRA made me do, but maybe it’s time I pulled you back from the fight again like when we were kids. You say the word: I’ll take up the shield so you can finally get the rest you deserve.”

Steve shook his head. “If you’re the one holding yourself accountable, then when do you decide you’ve done enough?” he asked, echoing Bucky’s own question. “Besides, the shield’s in about four or five pieces,” he continued, absent-mindedly rubbing at his forearm where Thanos’ sword had sliced through the vibranium shield and nearly severed the limb. It had long-since healed, of course, but the memory of it was still there. “I kinda miss it.”

“Get Shuri to make you a new one: you know she’d do it in a heartbeat.”

“Maybe it’s not _me_ she should make a shield for,” he answered, looking at Bucky out of the corner of his eye.

They lapsed into a comfortable silence, each deep in his own thoughts. Finally, Bucky said, “You gotta promise me two things.”

“What?”

Bucky placed his right hand behind Steve’s neck, turning him to meet his gaze. “No matter how long it takes you to get your head on straight and get this guilt out of your system: you come back. Those are going to be the longest five seconds of my _life_.”

Steve smiled at him and nodded. “Deal. And the second thing?”

“You look out for _yourself_ for a change. What was it you always said Erskine told you to be? ‘Not a perfect soldier...’”

“‘...but a good man’,” Steve finished.

Bucky pushed off the wall to stand, then held out his left hand to help Steve to his feet. “Maybe when this mission is over, you put away the soldier for a while and let the good man have his chance, all right?”

“The ‘good man’, huh? You’re saying I should give the shield to Sam?”

Bucky mirrored his smirk, but punched him in the shoulder for the sass anyway. He then pulled Steve in for a hug. “Yeah, that sounds good to me. Take care of yourself tomorrow, you idiot, and all the days after that, too. I’m serious: I’m going to miss you _so much_ those five seconds.”

Steve nodded, curling his arms around his oldest friend. “And I’m going to miss you, too, Buck... for however long it takes.”

*       *       *

Morgan was quiet for a moment when Grampa Steve finished, but before he could stand up to leave the room, she blurted, “I don’t think I like this story.”

“Why’s that, Little Bug?”

She frowned, rubbing a corner of her top sheet against her cheek. “It’s sad.”

“Well, maybe this part of it is a little,” he admitted, “but it doesn’t stay that way.”

“Did Captain Steve keep his promise to Uncle Bucky? Did he come back?”

Grampa Steve put his big warm hand over hers, stilling her worried motion. “It took a while, sweetheart, but yeah: he did.”

“So there’s a happy ending to Captain Steve’s story?”

He smiled, causing the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes to deepen. “I promise.”

**Author's Note:**

> This was going to be the story which started Steve’s actual mission across the multiverse, and I was about halfway through the installment when I decided another viewing of _Endgame_ was needed to refresh my memory on some details. Suddenly Bucky’s odd behavior in the last scene made _so much more sense_. Like me, the second-time viewer of the movie, he _knew_ that Steve wasn’t planning on a quick trip across the multiverse and back again, and he knew that when he did finally see him again, it was going to be Sam who’d be passed the Captain America mantle.
> 
> And then Bucky proceeded to get so many feels all over this story I had to rearrange _everything_ , and then Morgan got upset about broken promises, and then... 
> 
> The next installment finally gets Captain Steve into the multiverse. 
> 
> I promise.


End file.
